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Every year, Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) presents a program of classic movies in addition to a slew of new ones, and this year it treated festivalgoers to a beach screening of A Fistful of Dollars, in a new copy restored thanks to a grant by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA. )The screening was attended by over 450 cinema lovers, who cheered enthusiastically upon hearing about the HFPA’s contribution to restoring 84 classics.

A Road to Mother is set during one of the most tragic periods in the history of  the former USSR republic of Kazakhstan. Director, Akan Satayev tells a story of the power of a mother’s love which endures challenges of the turbulent times.

Two twin sisters - excellent singers – never leave each other’s side. Nor could they, since they are Siamese twins, attached at the hip.

Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea. Hand-picked first by Matt Damon – who was originally going to direct the movie – and later by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan to play Lee Chandler, the prodigal son of Manchester –By-Sea, self-exiled to Boston after a life-changing event, Casey Affleck relied on his passion for the material to compose his complex performance.

Our 2017 Cecil B. deMille recipient is an accomplished singer, besides, of course, being an extraordinary actress.

Emma Stone has been a fan of the musicals – on stage and on screen – since she was, by her own reckoning, “very young. ” “My mom was a huge Les Mis fan and she played it in the house and explained what that was all about”, she told us at the Toronto Film Festival.

We first noticed Hailee Steinfeld in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, all of 13 years old and standing her own opposite acting giants like Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin and Matt Damon. In writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen she offers a bravura performance of a different kind, exploring and exposing the emotional chaos of a very smart, very bright teenager in the punishing universe of high school.

In a key scene from Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply, Lily Collins’ Marla Mabrey, a young would-be star under contract with the powerful Howard Hughes (played by Beatty), plays the piano and sings a tune she had composed. Lily, daughter of popstar Phil Collins, was, she admitted, “very nervous.

“I was 19 at the time this story takes place in Southern California, so (…) when I read the script was the first time I had read something that was placed where I was from, first of all. ”, Annette Bening shared with us, talking about the road that took her to Dorothea, mater familias of a very peculiar kind of improvised family, in 1979 Santa Barbara, CA in writer-director Mike Mills’ film.

Golden Globe winner Katey Sagal, now on screen playing a devoted Italian mom in the movie Bleed For This, has always professed her love for music as a continuous source of inspiration and expression. And it started very early on, she told us: “I have a book coming out in March and I speak a lot about music in the book because my mother taught me to play the guitar and to sing when I was very young so it was my very first form of expression and I was a very shy, introverted kind of child with big emotions.